What do you do when you learn the North Carolina Department of Transportation wants to run I-540 through your back yard?
If you are Charlie Silver and the back yard is part of your 150-year-old family home, you first helpfully suggest alternate routes for the interstate and then start planning how to remove that home from the congestion and commercialism that has grown up around it: the Town of Knightdale and U.S. 64, for starters.
There is a documentary film about that planning called “Moving Midway,” a film by Silver’s cousin Godfrey Cheshire, a New York City-based film critic and journalist. More about that later.
But Silver has his own take on the move, and he has turned it into a personal slide show with comments and props such as pieces of carpet and wallpaper. You see how the house and four surviving outbuildings were moved across country and down a road to a new protected, secluded site. He talks about the artisans who made the move and reconstruction possible and their solutions, which they sometimes called “redneck engineering,” and he shows some of the interiors of both Midway and its sister Hinton family plantation house, Beaver Dam on Forestville Road.
You can see Silver’s slide show and hear his comments Sunday, Feb. 12, from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Wake Forest Historical Museum on North Main Street, a free event sponsored by the Wake Forest Historical Association.
Also, Frank and Kathryn Drake will be at the meeting with the scrapbook from 2004 when they moved the William Thompson house from its original setting along Falls of the Neuse Road through the fields behind the house to a new location on old N.C. 98.
The Wake Forest Historical Association will also offer a free filming of the documentary film “Moving Midway” on Sunday, Feb. 26, again at the Wake Forest Historical Museum and again from 3 to 5 p.m. The film is about 90 minutes long.